Tag Archives: Technology

Some time ago I found I was always looking up time zones and trying to work out what the time was where my email correspondents lived.

For a while I found quite a good solution to my problem with a circular gizmo which Reader’s Digest gave away free as a Promo.

Then I found an on board solution. The Iridium Time Converter. It worked well on a Win 98 platform.
I think Iridium then went out of business and the program almost disappeared. Each time I changed computers I googled for it and found it on a few websites run by Ham Operators. The program appeared to be fixed and never changing. An orphan with no long term hope of survival. But it still worked, even in Win XP.

Then I thought I would see if it was still available after having had my current copy for around six years.

I found a newer version! One which shows day and night in moving bands. It has Samoa added into its list of cities. It is basically blue rather than yellow and black.

The file is only available in two places that I could find so I have made its survival a little safer and uploaded it to a file storage site so it is available to anyone who wants it. It is a zip file and when opened lurks down on your task bar until you need it. (That has all changed!)

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE

There have been changes since this post was made.

Now James McPharlane has reclaimed his program and is integrating it with Google Earth and making all sorts of improvements. It is so much better than it was.

What this doesn’t explain to me is just when did homo sap get around to seeing shapes in stars? To naming those constellations which we now know only as our “Astrological Signs”?

The Plaeides or “Seven Sisters” is very old because it is known as that both in Northern Hemisphere mythologies and in ancient Indigenous Australian tales.

Taurus appears in the cave paintings of the Ice Age in France and Spain. Yes, I know the Seven Sisters is a part of Taurus.

What of my Capricorn and all the others? When did they appear?

Yes, while I am in awe of the discoveries made by Astronomers and Physicists and Mathematicians, my interests are people and their thoughts. The origins of the myths we are surrounded by. The almost universal myths. It is time for me to begin writing of them.

Like this:

Spam – the scourge of every e-mail inbox – celebrates its 30th anniversary this weekend.

The first recognisable e-mail marketing message was sent on 3 May, 1978 to 400 people on behalf of DEC – a now-defunct computer-maker. The message was sent via Arpanet – the internet’s forerunner – and won its sender much criticism from recipients.

Gary Thuerk sent the first junk email and it was to publicise new additions to DEC’s System-20 minicomputers. It invited the recipients, all of whom were on Arpanet and lived on the west coast of the US, to go to one of two presentations showing off the capabilities of the System-20. Reaction to the message was swift, with complaints reportedly coming from the US Defense Communications Agency, which oversaw Arpanet, and took Mr Thuerk’s boss to task about it.

Despite Mr Thuerk’s pioneering spam it took many years for unsolicited commercial e-mail to become a nuisance.

In 1993 it was named Spam by Joel Furr – an administrator on the Usenet chat system. Mr Furr reputedly got his inspiration for the name from a Monty Python sketch set in a restaurant whose menu heavily featured the processed meat.

Thirty years on, spam has grown into an underground industry that sends out billions of messages every day. Statistics gathered by the FBI suggest that 75% of net scams snare people through junk e-mail. In 2007 these cons netted criminals more than $239m (£121m). More than 80%-85% of all e-mail is spam or junk and more than 100 billion spam messages are sent every day.

April 1994 saw another pioneering moment in the history of spam when immigration lawyers Canter and Siegel sent a commercial spam message to more than 6,000 Usenet discussion groups. The Canter and Siegel e-mail is widely seen as the moment when the commercialisation of the net began and opened the floodgates that led to the deluge of spam seen today.

The majority of these messages are being sent via hijacked home computers that have been compromised by a computer virus. A lot of modern spam is deliberately malicious, aiming to steal your bank account information or install malware.”